The Return of the Surreal: Towards a Poetic and Playful Sociology
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The Return of the Surreal: Towards a Poetic and Playful Sociology Abstract This article argues that the time is ripe to reacquaint sociology and surrealism. Taking inspiration from surrealism’s emphasis on making the ordinary strange through bizarre, lively and sometimes haunting methods might result in a more poetic and playful sociology. The article looks at how this might be applied in practice through drawing on a variety of examples of social research that share some of the tenets of surrealism, not least the latter’s focus on social justice. This enables discussion of a number of methodological concerns stemming from feminist and post-structuralist thought, including the troubling of narrative coherency and the notion of ‘voice’. Infusing sociology with ‘a surrealist spirit’ requires opening up and moving away from rationality in ways that allow for the exploration of contradictions, irreverence, humour and paradox. Key words Arts-based methods, critical social science, feminism, humour, poetics, research methodology, surrealism Introduction The surrealist movement began in the 1920s in Paris, quickly spreading throughout Europe and Latin America, unleashing a whirlwind of desire, hysteria, dreams, games, radical poetry, mystery and chance encounters that rocked the good taste and rational outlook of the establishment. Refusing to take life at face value, not least because this would mean accepting social and political norms, the movement has produced a vast range of influential art, poetry, literature and performance that has posed a challenge to the status quo. Known for its strange, dream-like juxtapositions and visual non sequiturs, early surrealism was influenced by psychoanalysis. Rather than reduce Freud’s work to an elitist form of therapy, though, Surrealists ‘put it in the service of poetry and revolution’ (Rosemont 1998:45). Its central technique of free association liberated repressed desire and shone a light on the world of dreams and daydreams, and importantly discredited ‘the positivist rationalisations that make the world safe for capitalism and war’ (ibid.). Although surrealism is often thought to have died along with its founder André Breton in 1966, it continues to exert influence over art and culture. Over the decades it has continued to develop spirited ways of challenging hegemonic norms. Surrealist groups can still be found working across Europe, for instance the Surrealist Group of Stockholm and the Leeds Surrealist Group in the UK. In the US, the Chicago Surrealist group (founded in 1966) is still going strong. Surrealism has also had a lasting impact on alternative comedy, particularly in the UK, where its influence can be seen from the absurdist humour of Spike Milligan and The Goon Show to the ridiculously successful comedy troupe Monty Python’s Flying Circus which continues to loom large in people’s imaginations. Its opening titles and sketches are peppered with collage-like animations of hybrid animals or a giant foot descending from the heavens and squashing whatever it makes contact with. Cartoonist Barry Blitt based a recent New Yorker cover (4 July 2016) on Monty Python’s famous Ministry of Funny Walks sketch in the wake of the UK’s EU referendum with a piece entitled Silly Walk off a Cliff, illustrating (as well as the potential disaster that is Brexit), the continued common parlance of the surrealist comedy. Surrealism became entwined with satire in the 1980s (Gadd 2015) and can be seen at work today in the work of a range of comedians including Noel Fielding who is also a surrealist painter and collagist. With its poetic and playful approach to understanding the world, there is much scope for a surrealist sensibility to breathe life into sociology. This would be in keeping with Les Back and Nirmal Puwar’s (2012) mission to reinvigorate sociology through a focus on research methods. They have produced a ‘manifesto for live methods’ which promotes the idea that researchers ‘become exposed to openness and the liveliness’ of the social world (2012: 12) using the full range of senses and an air of experimentation. There is certainly a need to find ways to ‘account for the social world without assassinating the life contained within it’ (Back 2012: 21). And what if this life includes the emotional, the unseen, the unspeakable, the irrational, the half-forgotten or the hidden-behind-layers-of-acceptable-behaviour? There have in the social sciences, in recent years, been successful attempts to capture the ‘realm of complex, finely nuanced meaning that is embodied, tacit, intoned, gestured, improvised, coexperienced, covert’ (Conquergood 2002: 146). These have involved, among others, arts- based and performative methods (see Foster 2016), creative approaches (see Atkinson 2013), autoethnography (see Kafar and Ellis 2014), visual methods (see Pink 2007; Chaplin 2005), feminist approaches (see Sprague 2016) and queer methodologies (see Browne and Nash 2016). A surrealist approach to social research would be aligned with such approaches that seek lively and inventive ways to come closer to being able to access the unspoken and intangible, and in the process come face to face with issues that have implications for the wider social world. The 1930s surrealist dancer Hélène Vanel, a passionate advocate of the poetic, championed its ability to ‘reveal the secret of the ties that attach us’ to the ‘precious, intimate, and astonishing’ things of the world (cited in LaCoss 2005:53). ‘True poets’, Vanal argued, are those who ‘animate a world in re-creating it’ (ibid). For social scientists, a poetic approach needn’t literally mean writing research encounters as poems, although this can certainly be effective in terms of capturing emotion and enlivening findings (see Bhattacharya 2008). It might instead involve a willingness to look more lyrically and more imaginatively at the world, an act which in itself can be construed as rebellious. Latimer and Skeggs (2011:393) argue that ‘the political can be understood partly in terms of attempts to close the imagination down; a closure that seeks to fix the ways in which we think and conduct ourselves and make permanent the endless divisions that rivet the world into place’. An ‘open and critical’ approach to social inquiry is required. The act of keeping methodology ‘open, alive, loose’ (Lather, 2010:x), of acknowledging a variety of perspectives, requires an acceptance of difference and even the embracing of paradox (Foster 2016). The juxtapositions, ambiguites and absurdities celebrated in surrealism can provide some inspiration here, not least when they come with a dose of humour. This might act as a form of resistance to power and inequality through its reliance on ‘a kind of “double vision” – the ability to see the absurdity, irony or double meanings in social situations and roles’ (MacLure 2009:108). More playfulness would not go amiss in the academy either given that it is, as Watson (2014) observes, too often ‘terminally dull’. Genuine amusement and spontaneous delight is hard to come by in a world that is prone to taking itself rather too seriously. And so we march onwards, ‘the great academic army of the not quite dead yet’ (Watson 2014:418). Not only does this make for an unfulfilling existence, there is a danger that our legacy as sociologists will be to have turned ‘the diversity of modern experiences into lifeless relics’ (Back 2012:21). The article’s title is a play on Hal Foster’s (1996) The Return of the Real. The book explores the ways in which the art world has recently refocused attention on practices that are embodied, or grounded in actual social sites and social issues. One of Foster’s (1996) chapters is entitled ‘The Artist as Ethnographer’ and considers the ways that artists have attempted to adopt this new role. Conversely, in this article, the concern is for sociology and its research methods to become less literal and to draw on a surrealist sensibility. However, far from shying away from the ‘real’, this approach is intended to heighten it in poetic and playful ways. Discussion of some of the main tenets of surrealism is woven together with consideration of a variety of methodological conundrums that have been thrown up in feminist and post-structural debate. These include the importance of acknowledging emotion in knowledge production, the troubling of narrative coherency and moving away from privileging voice as the most authentic mode of meaning. Examples are provided of research projects that arguably display a surrealist spirit; ranging from the large-scale Mass- Observation project to a personal communication between researcher and horse. These are linked with a concern for promoting positive social change. This is in keeping with surrealist artist Toyen’s description of surrealism as ‘a community of ethical views’ (in Rosemont 1998:81), which is a suitably loose definition for the purpose of this article. Surrealism does not require locking up in the ‘dungeons of narrow definition’ (Rosemont 1998:xxxii): ‘[T]he many cages in which journalists, critics, and its other enemies keep trying to confine it are in fact empty … [S]urrealism is elsewhere’. Sheer daftness Surrealism has never been about artists or writers or performers escaping into the imaginary (LaCoss 2005:37). Rather, it aims to develop a ‘radical awareness’, a strategy that strives to ‘excavate the realities of everyday life’ (ibid.; my emphasis). Daily life is understood as being produced by complex forces including unconscious ones (Shaw 1996:2) so it is important not to take it at face value. For surrealists, a passionate attention to the everyday involves taking a stand against the status quo with the aim of overcoming repressive systems (Rosemont 1998:xxxv). The critical study of the everyday has been established in sociology for decades but it has recently experienced a resurgence in popularity. In a special issue of Sociology focusing on this theme, the editors noted how study of the quotidian is about more than the ‘straightforwardly mundane, ordinary and routine’ (Neal and Murji 2015:813).